Computer Stupidites (part 1)

Some of the things people do to computers is downright painful.

Recently, I got a call from someone who turned off his computer whenever he found himself somewhere in Windows he didn't want to be. "I just turn it off when I don't like where I am," he said. Wonder of all wonders, scandisk found a score of lost allocation units and bad sectors.

• Customer: "Hi, I was wondering if you could fix my laptop. It's under warranty."
• Tech Support: "What seems to be the trouble with it?"
• Customer: "My wife got mad and threw it in the pool."

An man purchased a laptop from me. He called about a week later and said that it would no longer boot up. He brought it in, and I discovered that sixteen nicely drilled holes were in the bottom of the case. I asked him about it, and he said the machine was too hot sitting on his lap, so he had drilled these "air holes."

"Could that be the problem?" he asked.

One day a customer called complaining that he just received his computer, but it won't turn on. When he first pushed the power button, the screen flashed and then everything died.

I couldn't do much over the phone, so I went to the customer's office. It was plugged in, everything was hooked up ok, but, sure enough, it refused to turn on. I decided to take it back and promised to deliver a new one as soon as possible. But when I went to pick it up, I couldn't.

Fearful of thieves, the man had fired some 24 inch bolts straight through the box, through the hard drive, motherboard, everything, locking it to his desk.

"Oh," he said, "I thought it was just the TV part that was important. Will my warranty cover this?"

I work in a call center for a large cell phone company that sells PDAs with phone functionality. I got a call from a customer who said her stylus had broken. I offered to transfer her to customer care, where they could order her out a pack of styluses. She said no, the phone had gotten "messed up." I asked what was wrong with it, and she said that when the stylus had broken, she'd tried to superglue it back together, then put it back in the slot before the glue had dried, and it got stuck in the phone. So she tried to take it out with a hammer and chisel.

I work for a major computer retailer and heard a page over the intercom for an available salesman at the customer service desk. Most of the salesmen are a little apprehensive when they hear this, because you never know what you are about to get in the middle of. As I approached the desk, I saw a well-dressed cowboy and a desktop tower on the service desk. One of the customer service reps informed me that the computer he bought today was broken, and he needed a replacement. So I agreed and started toward the tower to take it back. The gentleman stopped me and said he just realized he had forgotten to get his CD out. Before I could say anything, he pulled out a pocket knife and went for it. Luckily, we got him to stop before he did any real damage, and I showed him how to hook it up to a power cord and eject it normally. Never thought I would see somebody try to knife a computer.

While I was at college (back in the days of Archimedes computers), I often helped to teach new users the ropes while the teacher concentrated elsewhere. This one sweet girl was very new, and I didn't mind that she had no concept of the mouse, the screen, and whatnot -- she soon got good enough that I could leave her to do some task and help someone else. Pretty soon, however, she was tugging on my chair, and when I went to see what was going on, she said, "My bracelet is stuck in there."

Eh?

It was wedged into the floppy disk slot. Why? Apparently, the bracelet was annoying her when she typed, so she took it off. She found a small slot on the computer with a happy little door on it and just went ahead and shoved it in. Tech support had to rescue it by taking the thing apart.

I used to work at a printing site that still used paper tape. One of the tape punches failed, and I'd removed the punch mechanism to look at it. It was a complex mishmash of springs, levers, and all sorts of things. Periodically, paper dust would build up and gum up the works, and we'd have to clean them out.

But at this particular time, my boss walked past, saw the problem, and said, "Oh! That needs cleaning!" and before I could say or do anything, he grabbed a spray can of PCb cleaner and sprayed the entire mechanism.

Now, this stuff dissolves anything that isn't metal, especially plastic. Sure enough, all the plastic components of the punch mechanism started dissolving. There was a loud ping as one of the springs snapped free of its plastic housing and flew across the workshop.

The thing just fell apart. It never went back into service -- there just wasn't enough of it left to repair.

I used to work technical support and account services for a cellular phone company. One day an individual working for a construction company called and asked why we disconnected his service. I informed him that his service was fine and that his account was current, at which time I was informed that we had to have shut off his account because he couldn't power his phone on.

I began asking the usual questions, beginning with the model phone he was using. This often is a huge key to figuring out what the problem is, and it just so happened that he had the most problematic phone we had released due to its emergency yellow and black colors, looking vaguely like one of those water resistant portable cassette players.

We tried plugging it in, switching the battery, but it still wouldn't turn on. I asked him if it had been dropped or damaged before it stopped working. The answer was no.

I asked him if it had been exposed to water, and the answer was, "What does that matter? I have your waterproof model!"

I was sure I had struck the heart of the issue. It turned out that he was showing it off to his work buddies by throwing the "waterproof" phone into a bucket of water while he was joking around on the phone with the foreman.

I informed him that the phone was not actually waterproof, and that he would have to purchase a new phone due to the fact that our insurance policy did not cover damage from intentional misuse.

He explained that he heard a rumor that if you dry the phone out and replace the battery, they will sometimes continue working. This is sometimes true, so I asked him if the phone had been thoroughly dried.

The answer was yes -- he had put the phone into his clothes dryer with a load of laundry, which we then confirmed as the reason the face plate had broken off. He wanted an insurance replacement for his face plate, and I again informed him that our insurance policy did not cover damage from intentional misuse.

When my sister and I were both living in the dorms at college, she would frequently come to me for tech support.

• Her: "Hey, can you look at my laptop? It's having a problem."
• Me: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
• Her: "Every time I try to type a letter, three show up, and none of them are the letter I hit."

I went to check it out. Sure enough, the problem occurred exactly as she stated it. As I was trying to think what the cause might be, I looked down and noticed a noodle under the enter key.

• Me: "There's a noodle in here. How did that get there?"
• Her: "Oh, I spilled soup on my keyboard. Does that make a difference?"

We got a tech support call from one of our customers saying that she couldn't get the tape out of the drive following the nightly backup run. After getting nowhere on the phone, we eventually sent someone out to have a look at it. It was one of the old QIC tapes, the ones that have a hefty metal plate down one side that physically prevents you from putting them in the wrong way around. Our fearless customer was not to be deterred, however. When she couldn't push the tape in (because it was the wrong way around), she tried forcing it in, but to no avail. Then she resorted to getting a spoon and using it as a lever to force the tape into the drive. Not surprisingly, it wouldn't come out the following morning. She needed a new tape drive.

A customer had bought a computer from us about a year ago and a Voodoo 3 card just yesterday. He took it home and tried to install it but couldn't, so he brought them both in this morning. He ranted and raved, etc. He had reboxed the Voodoo 3, expecting a replacement, so we took the computer and the Voodoo 3 in the back and told him we would fit it for free. When we opened the box for the Voodoo 3, it was in a terrible state. The bit of metal that attaches the card to the case was taken off, and a wee heatsink had been scraped off the chip with a screwdriver. I reglued the sink and reattached the backplate. So we opened the machine, and tried to fit the card. Ack. Card is AGP, computer has exactly zero AGP slots. So we went back to the front.

• Me: "Sir, your computer has no AGP slots, and this is an AGP video card."
• Customer: "Yeah, but the card fit perfectly into the little white slot."
• Me: "Which white slot?"
• Guy: "There's five of them -- little white ones. There's a spare one."
• Me: "The PCI slot? Uhh...it shouldn't...let me check."

Sure enough, if you remove the heatsink and backplate, turn the card around, and really hammer it into the only free PCI slot, it will just fit snugly next to the hard disk.

We explained that the AGP card was completely destroyed and he had voided the warranty on it by hacking away at it with a screwdriver. The usual mad customer vs. techie exchange ensued, but he eventually backed down and bought the PCI version instead...and got us to fit it.

• Customer: "Can it damage a mouse to be thrown at a wall?"

One of our customers bought a scanner with a SCSI card. It wasn't connecting, so she brought it in. It turned out she had pried off one of the blank plates covering an empty ISA slot, then shoved the card through the hole and turned on the system.

I was on a tech support call yesterday, and one of our stores had a crashed server with a bad motherboard. They did not want to transfer the hard drives over to the new server we were going to send them, so I said, ok, mail the hard drives to me, and we would put them in the new server.

So I got the package this morning, and to my surprise I found...the circuit boards from the hard drives. They took the boards off the hard drives and send them to me.

Grinning, I called the store and asked them to send me "the rest" of the hard drives. I have never ever ever heard of this happening. Now how the heck am I going to find out which hard drive goes with which circuit board, and will there be any way to get them working again?

Recently, my uncle managed to talk my grandmother into getting herself a computer to replace WebTV, which she had used for two years. Not a day after receiving her computer, she called me to ask for some help setting it up, saying she had done everything right but couldn't get it to work. I asked her if it was turned on -- she said it turned on just fine, but she couldn't see a picture.

I asked her to check her monitor connections and make sure they were in tight.

• Me: "Are the cords to the monitor plugged in tight?"
• Her: "They should be in tight. I glued 'em there."
• Me: "You...glued them there?"

I decided I'd need to pay her a visit and see the damage for myself. Upon arriving to her house, she led me to the area where she had set her computer up. Immediately, I saw the problem. She was attempting to use her TV set as her monitor. I explained to her that she needed a proper computer monitor before she could do anything.

"The man at the store said I could use my TV just like WebTV," she said. "Why should I spend two hundred dollars on another TV just to use the computer??"

I looked at the back of the television and, sure enough, over each one of the connectors, she had hot glued one of the computer attachments -- including the modem line and her speaker cord.

"He tried to sell me one of those tiny TV things to sit on the computer, but I told him I had a perfectly good 20 inch one at home, and he said it would work fine!"

It took a bit of doing to convince her that the salesman had probably thought she had meant she had a 20 inch monitor at home. As I spent the next twenty minutes scraping glue off of the back of her television, she called the store and demanded to know why the salespeople had told her she could use a television with her computer.

In the end, I concluded that while the television and monitor cable could probably be saved, she would need a new modem cable and speaker cord.

I worked at a photo lab in New Mexico. Part of my job was outputing digital files to a film recorder. Everyone there was friendly, except for one woman who never seemed to like me. After a few months I asked my boss about it. He told me that before I got there, they had tried to train her to do the digital output. They even paid for her to go to a class to learn about computers. She was the only student in the class who managed to get a floppy stuck in the drive upside down and backwards. The teacher had to disassemble the machine to get the disk out. She told him she had to pound it with the heal of her hand to get the disk to go in. After that, the photo lab decided she probably wasn't the one for that position. She always resented the fact that I had 'her' job.

My mother was visiting one time when I was online. I remarked to her that the computer was running a little slow today. Her solution? Oil it. You can imagine how I wince every time I think of it.

A friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) bought a brand new Toshiba laptop computer last year since his "old" one was a model from the year before. He worked in the computer services office on campus here at our university. He decided one night that to impress his co-workers he would make his new laptop more decorative. He bought a can of emerald green Krylon spray paint and sprayed his entire computer (screen, mouse, keyboard, casing, and all) with it. He was shocked to find that his computer wouldn't work afterwards and decided the paint must be at fault. So the next day he bought a can of Goo Gone and a bottle of paint thinner and poured them both on his computer, then rinsed it off in the sink.

Again, he was shocked when his computer wouldn't work. He was even more shocked when Circuit City told him they wouldn't refund his money or exchange his computer for a new one.

I once had a customer whose cdrom drive wasn't working -- I suspect the reason was old or missing drivers, but the customer had tried to fix the problem himself. He thought the problem was that the CD had to sit tightly in the tray, so she took a paper clip, put it through the center hole of the CD, and fastened it to the drive tray. When he tried to use the drive that way, he was greeted with grinding noises caused by the disintegrating drive mechanism.

My mom had some problems with her system and figured she'd get a new modem. After she installed it, there were more problems than before. It turned out the modem was an ISA modem, and she somehow managed to put it into a PCI slot. How, I have no idea.

Once I was asked to help a friend with her modem troubles. Apparently (and I don't pretend to understand this) the company she works for has a modem hookup that is so slow that her PC's 56K modem cannot connect to it, so her husband installed the company-supplied Viking external modem. I've long since learned not to question user-logic, so I just check the back of the system to locate the modem and plug the phone line into it. For some reason, the slot the modem is occupying is too small for the phone jack to plug in to. Naturally I take off the cover and take a look. To my utter horror, this PCI modem had been "uninstalled" by being pulled out of the slot -- still screwed in, mind you -- and tilted upward so it rested on the top of the PCI slot. Why? The woman's husband insisted that Windows 98 would crash if you had more than one modem installed.

A customer came into the store one day to return an internal modem, which he had purchased a few days earlier. He complained that it would not work. I took the modem out of the package and could scarcely believe my eyes.

The card had been filed down to about half its original size.

• Tech Support: "Why has this card been filed?"
• Customer: "The modem didn't fit in the slot, so I had to file it till it would fit."

One day, I had gotten a call from a customer who was having a problem with his internal modem; the system was not detecting it. We went through several diagnoses over the phone, and finally he said something that made me pause.

• Me: "Sir, wait a second. Let me see if I just heard you correctly. Did you just say you were inserting and removing the modem while the system was up and running?"
• Customer: "Well, yeah, I did it both ways."
• Me: "Sir, I recommend that you do NOT do that. You could seriously damage your hardware."
• Customer: "Well, that's what I thought Plug and Play meant!"

Ten years ago, I was working for a company selling computerized cash registers. A customer called in to help me with a cash register that didn't connect to the back office computer.

• Me: "So, can you tell me the settings of the DIP switches on the cash register?"
• Customer: "DIP switch?"
• Me: "Oh, sorry, the small switches located on the backside."
• Customer: "Eeeerrr...there are no switches there."
• Me: "Oh, yes, there are. Right next to the power cord."
• Customer: "No. There are no switches. Not any more!"
• Me: (puzzled) "Huh? Not any more? What do you mean?"
• Customer: "Well, you know, my collegue told me that these switches might actually be what caused the problem, so I removed them."
• Me: "REMOVED THEM??"
• Customer: "Yeah, you know, removed them. With a chisel."